05/08/2023 When I first got born again, I learned to be with God, as I was enthralled that the Lord would love me, and consider me his, and also consider me to be his servant. That is what I had desired from when I was young, to be used by God and to do His will. When I had been born again for about 2 years, by then I had an understanding of hearing from the Lord closely, and knew that Jesus would be as close as I would “allow” Him to be. What a great God! I started to learn about “infused contemplation”, as I understand it. And this phrase and this concept is what I would like to reflect on today.
Basically, if I was in distress, or was in a time of focusing on God, maybe with my eyes closed – whatever time I would be in more concentration on God, I started to experience a phenomena that I considered very supernatural. I believe that after much transformation of my mind (Spring 2008), I started to have time where when I reached out in prayer, I could feel a pull back on my spirit, almost like a sensation of God trying to reach me, like my spirit feeling concentrated itself in a feeling of lightness, but yet it felt thick. This is very challenging to write about. What I could try to compare it to in the Bible is this: when James, who wrote a book of James in the bible, had written to the church about the practice of praying, he said “The fervent effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much”, and I connected that verse with the thought of this “fervent effectual” feeling. The Pull-back feel, the intense or dense-air feeling around the prayer is very hard to explain, and spiritual movements, spiritual activity for a person in prayer can be very subjective, itself. It is for that reason, that Scripture needs to be laced in everything we could think about in regards to prayer. There’s a lot of falsity in the spirit-world, but the narrow path will lead us to Jesus always! The Holy Spirit also, as Jesus said, will teach us all things!
I was learning to pray “harder” because of the duress I was in, and because I knew I had strayed from the Lord, not to the point of some would consider apostasy, but to the point where I felt like my faith was “ship-wrecked” (1 Timothy 1:19). I am not ever desiring to be ashamed of those times, though, because it’s in those times of being crushed, that we realized it’s much better to be broken to pieces that to be crushed. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalms 34:18). It was a hard time for us, but not against us! We learned that God can hold a broken person who is vulnerable and needy better than he can a person who always “has her act together”.
It has been a journey with the Lord to learn about some things I did not have prior teaching for, and many things I had heard of before, I would not have thought would have happened in my lifetime. But, I hope to keep one thing: that enthrallment of knowing Jesus wants me to have life even more than I want to have life! (John 10:10)
In writing this, I am happy to be in a relationship with a great man in the Lord, and to have two girls growing in Him every day. We need His strength to continue on in effectual and fervent prayer.
Rebekah's Reflections 